Specialists in GP Practices

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Specialists in GP Practices

Attend is a Microsoft solution developed by eBECS specifically to improve referral management, collaborative triage/clinical assessment, patient tracking and the utilisation of community clinics within Primary Care Trusts (PCTs), Practice Based Commissioning Consortia (PBCCs) and General Practitioners (GPs).

Attend enables PCTs and PBCCs to receive, record and progress the care pathways of patient referrals. It puts them in charge by giving them 24/7 online capability to triage and clinically assess referrals electronically, and then manage patient appointments and treatment to deliver the very highest levels of patient care.

Attend also provides PCTs and PBCCs with easily accessible and accurate referral audit information, thereby allowing them to predict the demand and likely cost of any treatment, which is critical for capacity planning and budgeting.

Commissioning is becoming ever more complex as Practice Based Commissioning mandates the need for a comprehensive understanding of the configuration and management of patient pathways at PCT and PBCC levels. Achieving this against a backdrop of major budget cuts makes this a huge challenge.

To address increasingly more localised commissioning demands, the ability to rapidly re-engineer patient pathways, for both PCTs and PBCCs, becomes a powerful differentiator in providing cost effective and high quality health services. However, the information which underpins the full understanding and management of the patient pathway remains elusive. Referrals are forwarded in a multitude of ways towards many IT systems (including Choose & Book) and the ability to consolidate all of this information into one simplified format for powerful reporting is a challenge – even for the most organised of PCTs and PBCCs.

The Solution

Understanding the early fundamentals such as the “reason for referral” and required “speciality” are key components in meeting this challenge. PCT/PBCC that can analyse this information easily can accurately predict the demands, and likely costs, of treatment long before the bills arrive – crucial for capacity planning and budgeting.

Significantly, those PCTs that recognise these needs today are the ones transforming into long term supporting organisations – essential to the PBC Consortia of tomorrow. Achieving this aim is further enhanced when the evidence shows that this approach delivers high quality services for patients – in the most cost-effective manner.

The role of Attend

Attend plays an extremely valuable role in ensuring PCTs and PBCCs can attain the right mix of understanding the narrow local as well as wider population demands for patient care.

Broadly, Attend services break down into the areas of:

Data capture of referrals regardless of source

Triage and Clinical Assessment

Provision of Patient Choice

Booking and management of Primary Care Service provision

Reporting on all of the above

Conclusion

The Attend solution ensures that PCTs, PBCCs and GPs have all they need to address how, where, and when, patients interact with the NHS.

Attend adjusts to fit the Referral Management process, the benefits of which are:

Attend clients do not need to employ any extra staff – the fully managed Referral Facilitation Service provides the complete service so that all referrals are sent to Attend’s own clinically-trained administrators, working to agreed service levels.

Attend clients have the Referral Centre but do not need any extra IT systems – an externally hosted IT service provision means that Attend clients can use their own administration centre because Attend sits securely across NHSNet/N3 with no impact upon the client IT department or infrastructure.

The entire referral process and the locally hosted IT system are managed completely by Attend clients – this means that our clients have full control at all times.

Attend is a Microsoft solution specifically developed by eBECS for GP Practices to improve referral management, collaborative triage/clinical assessment, patient tracking and the utilisation of community clinics.